MPs were elected to lead, but they are opting for turmoil and disaster

Whether Britain leaves the European Union and the manner of that departure, are the most consequential decisions that British politicians will face for a generation. The choices our leaders and representatives are making this week are as important as any they will make in their careers.

And as things stand, with the European Research Group of Conservative MPs and most Labour MPs pledging to vote against the proposed Withdrawal Agreement, the House of Commons will tonight deliberately and knowingly vote for the country to take an economic, political and constitutional leap into the unknown. MPs who were elected to lead will instead bring the country’s future down to the roll of a dice, unable to say with any certainty what the results of their vote will be.

Theresa May will, of course, carry the can for this in the end, which might be soon. She’s the PM, that’s how it works. She made errors for which she will answer to history: her original red lines did not reflect the close referendum result or Britain’s best economic interests; her willingness to trigger Article 50 without a clear negotiating objective; her failure to communicate her policies to her colleagues and the public; her decision to vote against her own deal on the Brady Amendment and thus burn away the last of the EU’s faith in her as a negotiating partner. These were all mistakes.

Yet none of them made failure inevitable. Even within those considerable constraints, a deal was struck and could have been passed. It wouldn’t have been a great deal, but it would have provided some clarity and certainty in a process that desperately needs both.

If that deal dies, as now looks likely, only turmoil can follow. It could take three forms.

1. We might leave without a deal, which would be economically horrible and strategically disastrous – those ‘WTO terms’ that some Brexiteers dream of would leave the UK trying to negotiate its future trading relationship with the EU from a position of crippling weakness. If you think ‘Brussels’ has ‘bullied’ Britain over the last two years, you probably can’t conceive the EU’s negotiating power in a no-deal scenario. Economic blight and national humiliation.
2. Or we might not leave at all. The EU seems quite willing to offer an extension of a year or so to the Article 50 process, knowing that would mean the end of Theresa May, the very real prospect of a general election and the possibility of a new UK Government that would either abandon the Brexit project, or least take the question back to the electorate in another referendum. Escalation of Britain’s political culture war.
3. The third outcome, which strikes me as less likely than the two scenarios above, is a short A50 extension followed by a rapid yet significant renegotiation of the deal to soften the exit and incorporate a customs union on a permanent basis. That might well pass the Commons with Labour votes, but could equally drive Tory leavers to try to bring down the Government. Whether or not that succeeded, we’d end up with much the same poisoning of politics as in number 2.

Each of those scenarios is regarded by at least some MPs as a disaster, an outcome that must be avoided. There is only one choice that averts all three outcomes: passing the Withdrawal Agreement.

If turmoil does indeed follow from today, remember that fact. This didn’t have to happen. MPs could have prevented it.

When the blame game starts in earnest – it’s been pre-emptively underway for a while in some quarters – those ERG Tories will be the ones to watch.

Always inclined to cry ‘betrayal’, they will tell a story of a dream denied, of May’s weakness and the EU’s perfidy preventing them delivering the perfect Brexit that would have prevented all this trouble. Some people, in the media and online, will accept that story and repeat it forever; it will become one side in a historic ‘debate’ about how the Brexit process hit the rocks.

But it won’t be true. It won’t convey the simple, decisive fact of this story: they could have voted for it. They could have avoided it all. They could have accepted the deal. They chose to crash the project they promoted because….Why? I honestly can’t understand it, no matter how hard I try.

It’s not, obviously, because the deal is a departure from the outcome the ERG long sought and promised. The May deal is arguably a cleaner, harder break than the one promised at the referendum. If the terms of this deal had been put to most Brexiteers during the referendum campaign, they would either have grabbed it with both hands, or denied wanting anything so severe for fear of spooking voters. Supposedly serious politicians who in 2016 considered Norway and the Single Market to be not just acceptable, but desirable, now decry as treachery a deal that would entail far less integration with the EU than the outcome they used to endorse.

Perhaps the explanation is a simple lack of courage. Perhaps the ERG secretly know that all the Brexit outcomes are worse than our current situation, and don’t want to be associated with those outcomes.

Or perhaps this is psychological. Maybe they really do crave the righteous purity of betrayal, the sense of burning frustration that a certain sort of person seems to find strangely pleasurable.

I have no idea. But I do know this: if this is the last act of Theresa May’s Brexit and the start of a slide into even greater chaos, it will be an act of conscious choice. The ERG Tories who will vote against the May deal again and then howl about betrayal and failure could have sealed their referendum victory in law and politics months ago. They could have won this battle and moved on to the next, if they chose to.

They did not. Instead, they chose whatever comes next – whatever that may be.